Search Results: "Marco Nenciarini"

7 February 2014

Another post about the Valve/Collabora free games thing. This time, the bad bit people trying to scam free games from us.
Before I start, I want to make one thing clear there are people who have requested keys who don t meet the criteria, but are honest and legitimate in their requests. This blogspam is not about them at all. If you re in that category, you re not being complained about.
So. Some numbers. At time of writing, I ve assigned keys to 279 Debian Developers or Debian Maintainers almost 25% of the total eligible pool of about 1200.
I ve denied 22 requests. Of these 10 were polite requests from people who didn t meet the conditions stated (e.g. Ubuntu developers rather than Debian). These folks weren t at all a problem for us, and I explained politely that they didn t meet the terms we had agreed at the time with Valve. No problem at all with those folks.
Next, we have the chancers, 7 of them, who pretended to be eligible when they clearly weren t. For example, two people sent me signed requests pointing to their entry on the Debian New Maintainers page when challenged over the key not being in the keyring. The NM page showed that they had registered as non-uploading Debian Contributors a couple of hours previously. A few just claimed I am a DD, here is my signature when they weren t DDs at all. Those requests were also binned.

DENIED

And then we move onto the final category. These people tried identity theft, but did a terrible job of it. There were 5 people in this category:

This is not a signature, it s a fingerprint. Amusingly, it s not the fingerprint for the person who sent my mail, but that of Neil McGovern a co-worker at Collabora. Neil assured me he knew how to sign a mail properly, so I shitcanned that entry.

From: "Xxxxx, Xxxxxxxxx" <x.xxxxx@bbw-bremen.de>
Subject: Incoming!
Hey dude,
I want to have the redemption code you are offering for the Valve Games
mQGiBEVhrscRBAD4M5+qxhZUD67PIz0JeoJ0vB0hsLE6QPV144PLjLZOzHbl4H3N
...snip...
Lz8An1TEmmq7fltTpQ+Y1oWhnE8WhVeQAKCzh3MBoNd4AIGHcVDzv0N0k+bKZQ=3D=3D
=3Du/4R

Yet again, a fingerprint. This one is for Marco Nenciarini. I found this request particularly offensive due to the subject line the haughty tone from an identity thief struck me as astonishingly impertinent. Still, when will scammers learn to GPG?

From: Sven Hoexter <svenhoexter@gmail.com>
Subject: Valve produced games
I'm would like to get the valve produced games
My keyring: 0xA6DC24D9DA2493D1 Sven Hoexter <hoexter> sig:6

Easily the best scam effort, since this is the only one which both a) registered an email address under the name of a DD, and b) used a fingerprint which actually corresponds to that human. Sadly for the scammer, I m a suspicious kind of person, so my instinct was to verify the claim via IRC.

31-01-2014 16:52:48 > directhex: Hoaxter, have you started using gmail without updating your GPG key? (note: significantly more likely is someone trying to steal your identity a little to steal valve keys from collabora)
31-01-2014 16:54:51 < Hoaxter!~sh@duckpond6.stormbind.net: directhex: I do not use any Google services and did not change my key

So yeah. Nice try, scammer.
I m not listing, in all of this, the mails which Neil received from people who didn t actually read his mail to d-d-a.
I m also not listing a story which I ve only heard second ha actually no, this one is too good not to share. Someone went onto db.debian.org, did a search for every DD in France, and emailed every Jabber JID (since they look like email addresses) asking them to forward unwanted keys.
All in all, the number of evildoers is quite low, relative to the number of legitimate claims 12 baddies to 279 legitimate keys issued. But still, this is why the whole key issuing thing has been taking me so long and why I have the convoluted signature-based validation system in place.
Enjoy your keys, all 279 of you (or more by the time some of you read this). The offer has no explicit expiry on it Valve will keep issuing keys as long as there is reason to, and Collabora will continue to administer their allocation as long as they remain our clients. It s a joint gift to the community thousands of dollars worth of games from Valve, and a significant amount of my time to administer them from Collabora.

24 November 2009

I am pleased to announce that Marco Nenciarini has joined the Dovecot maintainer team. One of his first contributions was converting the package to the 3.0 (quilt) source format which all the cool kids are doing these days.
One ongoing problem we have is that Dovecot does not (yet) have a stable ABI for plugins. This affects dovecot-antispam as described in bug #544588 The short term solution is binNMUs but obviously a better long term solution is needed. One idea I've had is to include dovecot-antispam as an additional tarball within the dovecot source package now that 3.0 (quilt) gives us that capability. This way, dovecot-antispam will be rebuilt (with the right dependencies) whenever dovecot is. I have previously experimented with multiple tarballs and it works although at the moment all the debian build tools (devscripts, *-buildpackage etc.) don't fully support it. I expect that will be rectified soon enough but there is a philosophical issue as well. dovecot and dovecot-antispam though related, are two seperate upstream projects with seperate versioning, maintainers etc. Does it make sense to lump them together? I say yes; conceptually they belong together. (dovecot-antispam is useless except as a dovecot plugin.) In fact we have many source packages like this, that only exist as workarounds for a flaw the lack of source dependencies in the packaging system. However when I brought this up on IRC, there was some disagreement.
So I put it to this august assembly, should source packages combine related but distinct upstream sources or not?